If you want an exercise in semantics, randomly ask five wired people to define the term hacker. Their answers will vary wildly, I guarantee. An old school techie may insist a hacker is a black-belt computer programmer or engineer. A belabored . . .
If you want an exercise in semantics, randomly ask five wired people to define the term hacker. Their answers will vary wildly, I guarantee. An old school techie may insist a hacker is a black-belt computer programmer or engineer. A belabored Webmaster may look upon the barbarian hordes trying to stymie his site with denial-of-service attacks as hackers. An AOL user may consider hackers to be Lex Luthor-like super criminals, such as how Kevin Mitnick has been popularly portrayed. Law enforcement, depending on its point of view, may consider hackers to be the proxies of corporate spies and nefarious foreign governments or modem-enabled gangsters. And a journalist, being a journalist, may throw up his or her hands and say, "They're all of the above."